The brief
A tiny-home cooperative concept: shared land, individual homes, collective maintenance. The model is simple to live, surprisingly hard to explain. Most visitors had never encountered zero-deposit, fully-furnished cooperative housing before. The site needed to do the explaining.
One concept constraint: the internal team should be able to edit copy themselves. No CMS license, no developer dependency, no waiting. The site should be as editable as a document.
Concept direction
A static MDX site direction, every page is a Markdown file the team could open in VS Code or Notion and edit directly. The content system is a thin TypeScript layer that reads MDX files and generates typed pages at build time. No database, no CMS, no API calls.
The brand had to feel warm without being twee. The housing model is cooperative and community-oriented, but the aesthetic needed to avoid the clichés of the co-living category (exposed brick, Edison bulbs, laptop-on-a-bean-bag).
Design decisions
Zen Old Mincho italic as the brand voice. A Japanese Old Mincho with genuine optical weight in italic, the large, looping "m" logomark communicates both modernity and craft. Paired with Noto Sans JP for UI copy, the typeface pairing holds warmth and practicality simultaneously.
Brand red (#D6001C). Not a startup coral, not a cooperative earth-tone, a clean, deliberate red that reads as confident and action-oriented. It anchors the brand without softness.
Cloud white (#F5F5F7). Slightly warm, not pure white. The background feels like paper, not a monitor. It makes the red accent land with more weight.
Search as the hero interaction. The cooperative model lives or dies on supply, people need to see real units, real prices, real locations before they believe the model works. The search bar is in the hero. Not below the fold, not behind a CTA, the first thing on the page.
Floating card with cost comparison. "Save est. ¥150,000 on initial costs" surfaces above the fold as a pinned card. The cooperative's core value proposition, dramatically lower upfront cost, is visible before a word is read.
Why it improves conversions
New models require new explanations. The conversion bottleneck for a cooperative housing concept is comprehension, not desire, visitors do not know if they want it until they understand it. The page sequences from big-picture value to mechanism to availability, so the search interaction has context before it appears.
